The pan flute is a musical instrument that has gained increased popularity over recent years, partly as a result of the mainstream appearance of recording artists such as Zamfir. A pan flute is typically composed of a series of parallel pipes of graduated lengths having open upper ends into which a player blows. Through proper selection of the lengths and diameters of the pipes, the pan flute is set up to play different notes of a musical scale.
Typically, the pipes of a pan flute have fixed lengths such that each pipe can produce only the note corresponding to its respective length and diameter. As a result, pan flutes are usually permanently tuned by design and manufacture considerations. This implies that the user of a pan flute designed to cover, say, a diatonic scale, will experience great difficulty in playing flats or sharps belonging to the corresponding chromatic scale. Consequently, this places a severe restriction on the songs that can be played on a conventional pan flute.
Moreover, although the above discussion referred specifically to pan flutes, other wind instruments having a plurality of pipes that are permanently tuned by design and manufacture considerations suffer from the same drawbacks.
While various solutions to the above problems have been proposed, none of these is satisfactory and thus there remains a need in the industry to provide a wind instrument that alleviates at least in part the problems associated with existing wind instruments having multiple pipes.